This project is motivated by the growth in the number of children in families headed by divorced mothers and by the evidence that fathers often fail to provide adequate child support or fail to comply with child support agreements. The project will develop an economic theory of the causes of divorce and its consequences for the welfare of the divorcing spouses and their children. A major goal of the theory is to develop a set of testable hypotheses to explain the determinants of divorce settlements within a framework which views marriage as an implicit contract and emphasizes the consequences of the fact that children are a "collective" good from the point of view of the mother and the father and, hence, that the interests of the parents may only partially coincide.